


the timeless children

by alpacasandravens



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon Divergence, Character Study, Other, basically: season 12 but if they were BOTH the timeless child, but i firmly believe the master is in love w the doctor, could be read as romantic or platonic, very canon-compliant until the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23215402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: He blinks, and suddenly, the child under the portal is joined by another. A little girl and a little boy. They are holding hands, and their eyes are wide with terror. Tecteun approaches, and kneels to speak to the children. They leave with her. He knows this story, but this isn’t how it goes. Why are there two children?Season 12, but the Doctor and the Master are both the Timeless Children.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Dhawan), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48





	the timeless children

**Author's Note:**

> a character study of the master? written by someone who has no knowledge of classic or extended universe canon and can barely remember new who canon? you bet.  
> warning for the Master's extremely unhealthy behavior re: the Doctor, also he talks about wanting to die so watch out if that will upset you.  
> this is my first work for doctor who so be kind

He is alive. It doesn’t matter how; he doesn’t care. And he  _ is _ a ‘he’ this time. Even though he doesn’t know much about himself, he knows that. 

Top on the list of things he doesn’t know: where he is. Second: where the Doctor is. Third: how his previous incarnation had stood wearing this dress. Sure, it looks good. And it flares out nicely when he makes a dramatic turn. (Which he does, even though there’s no one there to see, just to test the flair of this new form. Also because it’s fun.) But he used to be a lot smaller than he is now, and this dress needs to come  _ off. _

__

__

Over the next couple of hours, during which time he finds (commandeers) a reasonable-enough suit, he starts to remember. How his previous regenerations had killed each other. How he had -- and he almost shudders at the thought of it -- turned  _ good _ to help the Doctor. And he’d really thought it was worth it. That the Doctor would stop traveling around with random human after random human and finally start paying attention to him again.

__

He should’ve known that wasn’t going to happen. Because he’d regenerated alone, and the Doctor was long gone. 

__

Still, he thinks maybe he will give this ‘being good’ thing a try. Or at least not being explicitly evil. Not because he still desperately hopes the Doctor will come back for him, it’s not that. It’s something he hasn’t done before, that’s all. Who knows? It could be fun.

__

__

It is not fun. Whatever sense of moral righteousness the Doctor had wanted him to feel is missing. He saves an off-course spaceship from a rapidly expanding star and thinks only about how much he would have enjoyed watching it burn.

__

He wasn’t always like this, he knows. So he heads back to Gallifrey, returning for the first time in -- centuries? millennia? -- and he isn’t sure if it’s to rage against the Time Lords for taking his mind from him or to try and retrieve the feeling of being a kid, happy and sane and running with his very best friend.

__

__

He’s not lonely, that’s not why he does it. He doesn’t miss the easy sense of belonging he’d always felt on Gallifrey, and he doesn’t miss the way things used to be with the Doctor. It’s just fun to hack the Matrix right in front of everyone. That’s all. 

__

Really, he’s surprised he hadn’t done this before. It was just so  _ easy _ , barely even guarded. Nothing he couldn’t have done lifetimes ago. He flits between different memories, jumping between people he barely knew. Somewhere in here there had to be something  _ interesting _ -

__

There. 

__

There’s a blank spot in the Matrix. Something small, hidden behind piles of other memories, filed away between council budget meetings and the black nothing of a memory of dreamless sleep. It’s empty and gray and it feels familiar, somehow. 

__

He follows the thread back and back and back and realizes soon enough that of course it’s familiar. It’s the Doctor. He doesn’t know whether to smile or cry or rage as he follows the Doctor’s memories back, catching glimpses of their encounters, more frequent as they get younger. He remembers them from his own perspective, too, working so hard to come up with a brilliant enough plan to get the Doctor’s attention. Sitting beside the Doctor and feeling his mind shatter all over again as he watched the Time Vortex swirl before him and heard his best friend’s footsteps running away behind him. Remembers their days at the Academy, sometimes from his perspective and sometimes from the Doctor’s, all the memories with the same feeling of mutual affection spun through them until - 

__

Nothing.

__

Now he does rage. “WHERE. DID. IT. GO.” he yells, stomping his virtual foot against the blank gray inside of the deleted memory. Desperately, he digs deeper and deeper, coming up against this empty gray at every turn. This memory was huge, weaving through the earliest days in the Matrix’s history, and he needs to know what used to be here. What the Time Lords took away.

__

__

The memory of a child, standing below a portal. Two pillars stretching into the sky and beyond, into the purple haze of a boundary between worlds. 

__

He shakes his head. He remembers this. Every Time Lord remembers this, the Timeless Child, the first thing any of them see when they look into that cursed Vortex. This isn’t what he’s looking for.

__

He blinks, and suddenly, the child under the portal is joined by another. A little girl and a little boy. They are holding hands, and their eyes are wide with terror. Tecteun approaches, and kneels to speak to the children. They leave with her. He knows this story, but this isn’t how it goes. Why are there two children?

__

Flash forward to the children playing on a cliff. They fight over a toy rocket, tugging it back and forth between them. Somehow, he knows why they are fighting. They both want to be the one to throw it first. He has the disorienting feeling of watching through the little boy’s eyes as the girl loses her footing and falls backward, off the cliff.

__

She regenerates.

__

The boy is gone. He watches the memories as fast as he can, speeding the Matrix up and up and up. He can’t watch this in real time, not as the little girl is tortured in the name of science, over and over through so many regenerations.  _ This is the truth of the Timeless Child _ , he thinks with disgust as he watches Tecteun jab the needle into her own neck.

__

From there, the memories get patchier. Flashes of life, growth, and the inevitable screams as the Child, now an adult, is forced to regenerate into a child again, mind a blank slate. The last thing he sees before he runs from the Matrix is a face he knows. The Child, smiling.

__

“Hello,” the Child said. “I’m Theta. Who are you?”

__

__

He stumbles out of the Matrix, heaving. This is wrong. This has to be -- The Doctor can’t be -- His Doctor is NOT --

__

Some time later, he sits in a corner of the Citadel, breathing slowly. The Doctor made the Time Lords. Not voluntarily, not by choice -- he’d seen her scream, seen her die over and over -- but she’d done it all the same. And he can’t bear that.

__

__

He hunts down Rassilon first. He doesn’t know who Tecteun regenerated into, but Rassilon would be his first guess. Just another Time Lord more concerned with power than with everyone else. Although, he supposes that could apply to him too. He’s certainly made people suffer just as much.

__

That was the great lie of the Time Lords, the one they’d drilled into his head ever since he was a child, until it had become almost unquestionable. That they were superior. That their regenerations meant they were somehow better than the rest of the universe. And it was all a lie. There was nothing innately special about them, just the pure luck of finding a defenseless child.

__

(Does this mean she is special? He wonders. If the Time Lords were created of her, then he is and will always be below her, an accidental byproduct of her existence. Never her equal.)

__

After he kills Rassilon, he works his way through the rest of the Time Lords. One by one, they die, regenerations suspended. He smiles without joy as their lifeless bodies fall to the floor before him. 

__

As he stands in the flames of the Citadel, watching Gallifrey burn around him, he thinks he has finally done something truly good. She can never know, of course. She won’t see it that way. There’s no room in her morality for revenge, but he thinks that destroying the civilization that hurt the Doctor has been the best thing he’s ever done.

__

They hadn’t only hurt her, of course. They’d made him into this without his consent. Without her, he wouldn’t be anyone. Just another Gallifreyan, living a short life and dying for good. And he thinks he would have been okay with that.

__

That’s what he would tell her, he decided. He’d give that as his reason, because that’s what she would believe. He had surprised himself with the depth of his anger on the Doctor’s behalf. It’s been so long since he’d done anything for someone else, since she’d seen him help without any expectation of a reward, that she wouldn’t think him capable. And after everything he’d done to her, he couldn’t very well say that he’d visit this level of destruction on anyone who hurt her.

__

__

He doesn’t make it easy for her. She’d left him and regenerated again and picked up a new group of humans (three of them this time, and in his opinion that was three too many), and no matter how angry he was for her, he couldn’t forgive her for that. So he joins MI6 as “O” and he works with the Doctor on a one-off case. He keeps in touch with her, willing his heart not to hurt when she texts him in the middle of the night, using way too many emojis and exclamation points. She sends him photos, sometimes, of places she and her “fam” travel to. He makes sure to repeat to himself that he hates her before he saves every one. 

__

It gets routine, after a while. Usually he hates routine, would blow something up as soon as things stopped being unpredictable. But he finds he doesn’t mind so much, which is definitely unrelated to the fact that he can almost feel like the Doctor is his friend again. 

__

She calls him once, after an adventure. When he picks up the phone it is 3 AM and he spends the entire call refraining from mentioning their days at the Academy. 

__

He makes the perfect plan. She invites him onto the TARDIS to stop a threat he created, and he pretends to be in awe of the spaceship. The wonder on his face is real -- wonder at how easy it is to travel with the Doctor when he is anyone other than himself. He thinks she really might hate him, and he refuses to let any of the sadness at that realization show. He’d always been a good actor.

__

When it comes time to reveal his identity, he laughs at the horrified look on the Doctor’s face and tries not to be offended that none of her humans know who he is. He teleports out of the plane shortly before it explodes, trusting that she will get out of there alive. She always does. 

__

The Doctor doesn’t text him again. He doesn’t change his number, though he knows she’ll never think to use it. There’s still a small part of him that misses the old days, though he doesn’t know anymore whether he means at the Academy or just a few weeks ago when he says that. 

__

__

The anger burns through him for a long time. He follows the Doctor to the 1830s and then the 1940s, and he has seventy years to think after she turns his perception filter off and steals his TARDIS. He’s been angry for so long. First it was at the universe, for daring to think it was equal to him. Then at the Time Lords, for taking his mind and twisting it into something unrecognizable. Now, he’s not sure if he’s angry at the Time Lords for hurting his friend or angry at the Doctor for being the unwitting cause of all this or angry at himself for believing their lies. 

__

It’s disappointing when the Doctor stops the Kasaavins. Not that he’d really counted on that plan working; it had been more about showing the Doctor creatures from another dimension. Creatures like her, maybe. But it was so frustrating to put almost a century into a plan and have the Doctor unravel it in the span of a day. Maybe it was easy for her. He immediately batted away the thought that maybe it was easy for her because she really was better than him. 

__

Still, he’s spent long enough with her to know she’s curious. So he records a message just for her, one that he knows will have her tearing the universe apart looking for an answer. He almost doesn’t regret being sent to the Kasaavin dimension, because he knows it was worth it. The Doctor’s past was a lie, and now she knows it. Finally, he’s won.

__

__

It’s not too hard to find his way back from the other dimension. It’s easier than it should be to fix the Boundary portal on Gallifrey. He’s close, he’s so close to the culmination of his plan. He can’t fail this time, he’s practiced everything from his grand entrance to his speech.

__

There’s something going on with the Cybermen when he gets back. Normally, it wouldn’t be his concern (the thing with time travel is that if there’s a crisis, you can always come back and deal with it after a nice long vacation or ten, or simply let the Universe get taken over if it really came to that), but the Doctor has gotten herself caught up in it. They’re easy enough to work into the plan, and really, he can’t believe he hadn’t thought of Time Lord Cybermen before. It’s a brilliant idea. 

__

When he steps through the portal and holds his hand out to the Doctor, his plan is unstoppable. She will follow him, she will learn the truth, she will break. And finally, she will use that Cyberman’s convenient Death Particle to wipe out the last of the Time Lords -- him. 

__

She should hate him, after this. After everything he’s done. He burned Gallifrey, threatened her friends time and again. He worked with the Nazis. And if she hates him, maybe she’ll kill him. (Maybe she’ll pay attention to him like she used to when she thought he could be redeemed.)

__

But if that isn’t enough, what better excuse than his new creations for the destruction of their -- he stops himself. The Time Lords aren’t her people in the same way they are his. All wrong, created from her pain, creations that need to be destroyed. And just in case she isn’t angry enough at him, at his revelations, he will have corrupted the Time Lords enough that she’ll have to complete her revenge. Everything they made from her has to go. 

__

__

It hurts when the Doctor refuses to take his hand. He remembers his last lifetime, being the one to refuse the Doctor’s hand. The lifetime before, the Doctor holding him as he died. How the tables have turned.

__

He’s just being petty by the time they enter the citadel. Pointing out all their old memories from their first lives -- what he’d thought had been both their first lives, anyway. All reduced to rubble. Just like whatever connection he’d thought they had. 

__

There’s no real reason for him to call the Cybermen and offer them Gallifrey beyond the hurt and betrayal he knows he’ll see on her face. And he watches her, glancing back every few seconds, to see how she’s reacting. Soon enough, there will come a point where she’ll break. Either she’ll lash out at him (he hopes for this one, hopes for her to end them both, it isn’t fair otherwise, she can’t live on after he’s gone) or she’ll crumble into herself, and she’ll feel what he felt, the gutting shock of revelation. 

__

She does neither.

__

“You’re the Timeless Child!” he repeats, standing in the gray blankness of the Matrix with her. She is pale, her eyes red-rimmed. 

__

“No, I’m not.”

__

“Yes!” he yells. “You are! You are the Timeless Child!”

__

“No no no no, something doesn’t add up.” The Doctor grabs his wrist, and he doesn’t think about the fact that this is the first time she’s reached out to him since he was O.

__

The Doctor is in control of the Matrix now, rewinding the memories through the scenes of Tecteum’s torture. They’re back under the Boundary portal, looking at those two towers stretching impossibly through the sky.

__

“That’s you, don’t you see?” he says, jabbing a finger in the Child’s direction.

__

“Why are there two of them?” She speaks so softly he almost isn’t sure he’s heard her correctly. “Master. Why are there two children.”

__

  
  


__

They’re on a hill in the Matrix. It’s not a real hill, only a memory unpopulated enough to not be distracting, but the wind feels real enough. He sits with his back to her, knees hugged to his chest. She is sprawled on the ground. 

__

If the Doctor is the Timeless Child, and she is, who --

__

He shakes his head. Outside the Matrix, he’s just absorbed the Cyberium, and even here he can feel it work its way through his body. It wants to invade this place, and he doesn’t let it. 

__

“When did you find out the Child was me?” The Doctor has woken up. She moves to sit next to him, and he turns himself so he still can’t see her. He can’t bear to look at her right now.

__

“Right before I burned it.”

__

“Gallifrey?”

__

He rolls his eyes.

__

“Why did you do it?” She sounds hollow. He thinks his plan might have worked. He might have broken her. He wishes he hadn’t.

__

“They made me from you,” he says, but he can’t even convince himself that’s the whole story. “I would be nothing without you.” And that’s the truth, but not because of any genetics experiment. 

__

He can’t see her, but he can feel her eyes on him. She doesn’t believe him. He’d been a better liar, before.

__

“Do you know who the other child was?”

__

“Don’t.”

__

The Doctor rests a hand on his shoulder. She’s gentle, gentler than she’s been with him in lifetimes. “Do you know?”

__

He turns around then. There are tears in his eyes. “It doesn’t matter who the other Child was,” he snaps. “I killed them. I killed everyone. And I’d do it again.”

__

“All the Time Lords, yes.”

__

He opens his mouth, probably to argue, but she stops him before he can begin.

__

“If I’m the Timeless Child, that means I’m not a Time Lord. And that means you aren’t either. Because you’re the other Child.”

__

He laughs. “And I thought I was the crazy one.”

__

“It’s true.”

__

“Why are you telling me this?” 

__

She laughs, and it’s defeated. “Why did you tell me?”

__

There’s nothing to lose from honesty here, he thinks. “I wanted you to hurt. I wanted to take your identity from you, for you to understand how much it hurt me.” He can feel himself losing control, getting louder and more manic. “Because it hurts, Doctor. You were the most important person in the universe to me, and you lived lifetimes before I even existed! And they took those from you!”

__

He’s dangerous right now. Why hasn’t she moved? The Doctor smiles sadly, unafraid, and speaks. “They did. I’ll never truly know what I’ve done, or how long I’ve lived. But I know who I am. And I never lived a lifetime without you. You saw us under that portal together. From our first moments in this world, you were there with me. You held my hand.”

__

“That could’ve been anyone.” He wants to believe her though, wants it so badly his hearts hurt.

__

“It’s you.” She’s so certain. He looks into her eyes and doesn’t see a trace of doubt. “We’ve always been connected. Who else could have ever been my best enemy?” The Doctor stands up and reaches out a hand. “Come on, Kosch. Help me save my friends.”

__

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed! if you did, leave kudos/a comment, or you can find me yelling about the Master on tumblr @alpacasandravens


End file.
